'Far from the Madding Crowd' by Thomas Hardy

 ‘Worlds in Collision’ could be the subtitle of ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’.  It set the template for much of British fiction.  When you change your social orbit, comedic, tragic events happen, and the clockwork orrery is awry.  Gabriel Oak becomes or has the potential to become landed, a peasant proprietor but by the action of a rogue sheepdog becomes a poor shepherd once more far from the marital considerations of Bathsheba Everdene.  That apparent epicycle (I’m just getting going) or going backwards will be corrected morally, and socially, or you’ve never read a Victorian novel.  True but Hardy’s sadism in relation to his characters is well known so Oak may yet come down in a storm.  There is one and Oak withstands it in a fine set piece of saving the corn from the tempest.  Boldwood (!) loses his and cherchez the same femme.  Bathsheba is considering him, Boldwood, as a suitable candidate but her dry powder meets the flash of Troy and launches a thousand plot parentheses.  They become entangled in a dark wood.  He, the vile seducer, is the result of social miscegenation so to speak being the natural son of an aristocrat and his mother the wife of a doctor.  How on earth did Bathsheba become a spinner of mens’ fates, a Moirae?  By rising in the world through inheritance of a substantial farm which she insists on running herself, a planetary wobble that surely we hope and fear may be catastrophic.  ‘Down here for dancing, up there for thinking’ she cannot manage, of course.  Gabriel Oak can.  He bends but does not break  displaying an annoying lack of manly irascibility.  Bathsheba has a great bench and he accepts that even though he was once a good match he must wait on the sidelines.  It’s a dull business being a Victorian stoic, just you, Marcus Aurelius and mutinous natives.  And that brings me to the comic chorus of the rustics there at all the tragic inflections of the plot.  They like a drink and are full of sententious observations on life’s vagaries.  That hasn’t changed.

Hardy was 34 when this was published.  Melodramatic but not so much as to ruin it and with a poet’s eye for that odd detail that makes us believe.   Placet.